Her mind was always playing tricks on her.
Sometimes there was a key glinting in the corner of her eye, the key… maybe it was the key to freedom. But as soon as she turned towards it, she would blink and it would be gone.
Sometimes she saw people. Once it was her mother, once it was her grandfather, once it was her friend from preschool. It was always different, every time.
But it was also always a trick. When she had first started seeing it, she would tell herself that it was just a trick of the light, moonlight glinting off of the metal table, bolted to the floor.
But the longer she watched it out of her peripheral vision, the more she became aware: it was a key, just out of her reach, teasing her. Every. Second. Every. Day.
Sometimes she would be playing the piano in the common room hours and when her fingers would slide over the keys, finding the right ones. Then she’d see them. Just people standing there, watching her. Usually they weren’t real, but she never turned to check. She would just keep playing, one note after the other, after the other. Sometimes it was like the endless days, weeks, years… she never kept track. There were so many days that no matter how sparingly she tally marked each day, there wasn’t enough paint to chip in the world, it seemed. It was so strange, seeing days pass by in minutes. Sometimes she’d sit in her chair and just watch it, just watch hours float by like leaves on a draft of wind. She liked to write. About what she saw, what she felt, in her tiny psych room.
They thought she was crazy, but she knew better. They were just premonitions- people from the past haunting her future. She didn’t mind them, just as long as they stayed far enough away. She would never admit it, but they did scare her sometimes. They were harmless…
Mostly.
She sometimes did think she was crazy. She didn’t trust herself with names anymore- but she still knew hers, as if holding onto a scrap of her ruined past.
Emily. No… Emery.
Yes, that was it. It used to roll off of her tongue so easily that she would start addressing herself as Emery when she spoke aloud… and yes, the chair was Richard. He was a wondrous listener. But she didn’t trust herself with names. They made things into people- personification. Inanimate objects that would be given human characteristics. Like Richard.
She liked to hold on to a bit of her sanity. No matter how much the premonitions convinced her to let it go, she always had a foreboding sense that it was wrong.
In the beginning, she used to beg them to let her go. She was young then- sixteen. Seventeen. Now she pretended to swallow her sleeping drugs and spit them out when they weren’t looking, so she could stay up if she wanted to. They were trying to keep her from the premonitions, which she didn’t like. They were her only company. They understood her, sometimes they listened to her. They didn’t like to stay around- but sometimes they'd stay longer if she begged them and sang to them. They liked singing. Sometimes, if she started to sing, they would all come around- and she would know if they were real or not if she saw they bed indent when they sat at the foot of it.
Sometimes they would leave little things around for her to see… a lipstick tainted cup, a scrap of fabric, a slip of paper. She used to save all of these -save for the cups- in her floor, under the loose boards, along with some of her sleeping pills. The pills were a translucent green, twice the length of her fingernail. They were coated in gloss to help them go down better.
Hardly anyone visited her. No family, no friends… in the beginning, many came every day. But now it was nine years later, and she was twenty five. No one came anymore.
She hadn’t spoken in seven years. She had nodded her head in thank you’s and yes please’s, and shook it. No thank you. Not today. No water, thank you.
Sometimes she’d sort through her memories like leafing through pages of photo albums, on days when she could hardly stand to leave the room. Sometimes it was nice. Sometimes it wasn’t.
The premonitions hardly came anymore. She thought that the ones that did were real. There was nothing exciting to do, nothing that ever happened that would keep her up at night writing about it. The days were just there, always just there. She never laughed, never cried.
But one day her door opened, squealing with rusty disuse. She looked up. There was a man there. He was wearing a suit, expensive looking, pleated pinstriped pants. She didn’t know him, she was sure of it.
“Hello,” he addressed her brusquely. “My name is Cornelius Sanatra, and I’m you lawyer. I’m getting you out of here.”
She couldn’t remember a time that she had cried in here, save for the first week.
A single tear leaked down her cheek.
Ri ŁΞΛТ
